


In Every Minute

by copperbadge



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-30
Updated: 2009-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-08 02:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack will live forever, but that's no reason not to live for now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Every Minute

**Author's Note:**

> Beta thanks to 51stcenturyfox and Cruentum!

"You spent five years with John Hart," Ianto says once, in the dark.

He does that, sometimes; waking in the morning, or lying awake at night, or after sex (once in a while, _before_ ). He'll just say something, random and disconnected. Jack used to wonder if he had some kind of mental disorder left over from watching all his friends die horribly -- some little glitch that sometimes sent him slightly off-track from ordinary people. 

He suspects, now, that Ianto just thinks Jack is following his leaps of logic from one subject to another. There is a lot Jack knows that nobody in this time can or will ever know, but his people are broken in very special ways, and Ianto might actually be better at deduction than Jack is.

Still, when Ianto brings up John Hart, Jack just snorts a laugh and rolls onto his back in Ianto's bed, arms lax and slung over his head. 

"Five years? No," he says. 

Ianto turns his head, a moving shadow. "No?"

"Not even close."

"But he said, that time in the bar..." Ianto trails off expectantly. Jack smiles. He waits, wondering if Ianto will ask more, but Ianto just watches him, eyes dark and half-lidded, patient. So patient, this one. 

"What did we say?" Jack asks, prompting, gentle.

"Two weeks," Ianto repeats. "Except two weeks was caught in a time loop, so it was five years. Like having a wife, he said. And he was the wife."

"It was five years for who?" 

He can hear the slight shift in Ianto's breath when he works it out.

"You were together for two weeks, while the rest of time looped around you," Ianto says. "So when you came out, five years had passed."

"Very good, grasshopper. Make a Time Agent out of you yet," Jack says, and half-means it. If he wanted to, he could spend ten minutes tomorrow making arrangements, and a recruiter from three thousand years in the future would come and offer Ianto Jones a job. It's happened before; with all of time at their feet, humanity of Jack's era can choose the brightest from all of history, not just the linear ones. 

But he wants Ianto here with him. Selfish, perhaps. Still, Jack has so little that he holds to what he has. He believes that Ianto would choose to stay if he had the choice, and anyway the Time Agency always did fuck with timelines too much. 

"So why the jokes about wives? Or was that just posturing for us kids?" Ianto asks. Jack lifts a hand to drag his knuckles down Ianto's chest.

"If you were a kid, we wouldn't be here," he answers, aware his voice is low and rough, the way Ianto likes to hear it. Ianto isn't distracted.

"The wives?" he says pointedly. Jack rubs his eyes with his other hand.

"Five years is a long time. Well, it was -- will be, in the then that hasn't happened yet. Five years ago text messages were the wave of the future. Who had a mobile ten years ago?"

Ianto blinks at him sleepily.

"Imagine what it was like for us," Jack elaborates. "Out we came, into a world we hadn't seen in five years, a world that had moved on. We were timelocked from going back -- long story. We only had each other for a while. It felt...safe, being with him. We were partners. We were the only ones who knew how it felt." He closes his eyes. "Like being married."

"Oh," Ianto says softly. He's silent for a while. "You've lost a lot of time."

Jack turns, at that, to look at him. "Hm?"

"Five years here, two years there -- that's what you said to me once, isn't it?" Ianto's gaze is steady. "They say when we're little time seems slower because we've had so much less of it. When you're five, a year is a fifth of your whole life. When you're ten, it's a tenth." He frowns. "We must seem so fleeting to you now."

"You still matter," Jack insists.

"Blink and we're gone," Ianto muses. Jack pushes himself up enough for the streetlight's glow to catch his face through the half-open curtains of the flat. He blinks deliberately. Ianto, to his surprise, bursts out laughing.

"So I'm morbid," he admits, looking up at Jack with a mixture of adoration and fear that is -- heady, and still makes Jack's pulse jump. "I know. Enjoy it while you can, eh?"

"Something like that," Jack agrees, because Ianto is young and missing the point, but hopefully he will understand before he dies. 

Jack is old, so old, and yet he still lives every second. Ianto will be one moment in his long life, but inside of that moment it still feels like it could be forever. Just as it does with any lover, and has with all of those in the past. 

It would be vastly unfair to remember the pain and not the pleasure, after all.

"Something like that," Ianto repeats his words sleepily, drifting off. 

Jack counts the heartbeats in his lover's chest until it becomes abstract, a reassuring rhythm, and then he, too, sleeps.


End file.
